To visually experience a live event from a remote location, a video can be streamed to a viewer at the remote location, or the event can be recorded and streamed later to the viewer. However, because bandwidth is limited in most cases, some form of compression (either lossless or lossy) such as MPEG-4 is used to reduce the amount of data being transmitted over the network by a factor of 100 or more. This allows the transmission of the video to be practical over low-bandwidth wired networks or most wireless networks.
With the advent of virtual reality (VR) and associated viewing devices (such as VR headsets), there is an emerging interest in virtually experiencing live events remotely. But, the amount of data required for transmission over a network may cause significant problems with quality and efficiency of the viewing experience, because an example data size for a single 3D model could be in tens of megabytes. As an example, for sixty frames per second, transmitting and processing the frames in sequence could result in gigabytes of data per second. Even with significant compression such as not transmitting portions of the scene that do not change from frame to frame (similar to video compression strategy), the process still results in tens of megabytes of data to be transmitted remotely—which makes it impractical, especially for wireless networks. Also, methods to further compress the data, such as traditional 3D compression to reduce the number of triangles, can significantly reduce visual quality.